Sports

Lindsey Vonn "very happy" as rehab progressing well

Skier confident in comeback for Sochi and beyond

Lindsey Vonn meets with fans Friday at a public celebration in Vail for her and teammate Mikaela Shiffrin. (John Dakin, Special to The Denver Post)

VAIL — Lindsey Vonn looks and sounds happy. Even though she is recovering from the most serious injury of her career — a knee reconstruction that threatens the chances of defending her Olympic downhill title — her rehab is progressing well and she has gotten past the grieving that came with the untimely end to her season.

There is that other thing too — a relationship with Tiger Woods she declines to discuss in the media.

"You can just say that I'm very happy, but we really want to keep things as private as possible," Vonn said in an interview Friday. "All you really need to know is that I'm happy."

Actually, her social life has taken a hit. Vonn typically attends a lot of celebrity events in the offseason, but the injury is getting in the way. Her doctor, Vail's Bill Sterett, doesn't want her to wear high heels for a few more weeks.

"We're going to have to work on that. It needs to be a little sooner," Vonn said with a smirk. "I really haven't done anything exciting. I've been pretty pathetic in that I go to rehab, I go home, I go to rehab, I go home. It's a forced vacation. It's weird to wake up and I don't have a race, or I just have to go to therapy. It feels like I'm lazy sometimes, but it's also good for my body to recharge and recover."

There were steps of progress last week. On Monday, she started walking with only one crutch. Friday, she walked quite a bit without the other one.

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"Being on one crutch to no crutches is a huge difference," said Vonn, whose surgery was seven weeks ago. "I feel like I definitely turned a big corner after the five-week mark, where I felt like my knee was really doing well and I was ready to walk on it again. ... I hate being helpless, and I hate having to ask people to do things for me. Now I'm really pumped. I feel like I have my independence back."

Until Feb. 5, when she crashed in a super-G at the world alpine championships, Vonn was the rare racer who had not suffered a serious knee injury. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament and medial collateral ligament in her right knee. She also suffered a fracture of her tibial plateau, which could have been a lot worse than it was.

"It's definitely hard to be experiencing something so new, but at the same time it gives me a lot of motivation to know that pretty much every person on the ski team and the World Cup has had an ACL injury, so I know it's not a problem to come back from it," Vonn said. "The fracture healed up perfectly, so that won't be an issue."

The first women's event at the Sochi Olympics is Feb. 10 — one year to the day after her surgery.

"The more time goes on, the more confident I am that I'll be ready for Sochi," Vonn said. "I was a little bit nervous before the surgery, but every day since then the confidence has just gotten better and better. I have plenty of time, so I just have to make sure I do the rehab like I'm supposed to, and I don't have any setbacks. I should be perfectly on time to be skiing, hopefully in the first speed races of the season."

That's key, because the first speed races will be held Nov. 29-Dec. 1 at Beaver Creek, traditionally a men's stop on the tour. This year the women will race there so they can get a feel for the new course that will be used for the 2015 world championships. A week later the women go to Lake Louise, Alberta, where Vonn has won 14 World Cup races.

Vonn got to race once at Beaver Creek, last December when a super-G scheduled for Val d'Isere, France, was moved here because of lack of snow there. She won.

"If I'm not ready, I'm not going to race," Vonn said. "I would love, love, love to race at home, to race on the new world championships course. The timing is really not ideal. If I'm not ready, I'm not going to push it, because next year the main priority without a doubt is the Olympics. ... I'm going to make sure I'm 100 percent before I start racing, and I'm not going to do it sooner no matter what."

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